TumbleBookCloud is an online collection of read-along titles for young adults and adults which features adjustable online text and complete audio narration. It also features National Geographic videos.

One of the coolest things to see in Mexico City is a futuristic library called Biblioteca Vasconcelos. It reminds me of something from a sci-fi novel or film. I gasped when I first saw it and it just got more and more incredible the further in I went. The architecture is stunning and unique, like no place I've ever seen before. It was designed by Alberto Kalach and opened in 2007 after three consecutive years of building. There are over half a million books spread out over 38,000 square metres or 409,000 square feet. It's called a 'mega library' because it's actually five libraries melded into one. There are tons of places to sit and work, free wifi, courses and workshops, as well as other community events like free concerts. Don't miss the balconies that give you fantastic views of the Zocalo of Mexico City. If you're a book lover like me or enjoy seeing outstanding architecture, Biblioteca Vasconcelos should not be missed! It's one of the most memorable and favourite places I visited.

Nineteen African public librarians will travel to Lithuania and Poland as part of IYALI (the Young African Library Innovators initiative).

IYALI is an initiative of the EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme (EIF-PLIP). The initiative aims to expose emerging public library innovators in Africa to experiences and ideas from other developing and transition economy countries.

In Episode 16 of the Dewey Decibel podcast, American Libraries magazine looks at the "fake news" phenomenon—its history, how we become susceptible to it, and how we can fight it.

Host and AL Associate Editor Phil Morehart talks with Joanna Burkhardt, fake news expert, professor and director of the University of Rhode Island branch libraries, and author of Teaching Information Literacy Reframed: 50+ Framework-Based Exercises for Creating Information-Literate Learners, about the history of fake news and how and its pernicious presence in today's media landscape.

Next, Dewey Decibel Senior Game Show Correspondent and AL Associate Editor Terra Dankowski quizzes librarians on fake news headlines and talks with them about news literacy at their libraries.

Finally, Morehart talks with Marnie Shure, managing editor of The Onion, about the satirical newspaper's very specific brand of fake news, the role of comedy in truth telling, and how current US politics affects its work.

Walk through one of the doors embedded in the three-story wall of windows at the front of the building’s sleek white exterior, and you’ll find a Starbucks, a geospatial technology lab, and a digital studio sponsored by Adobe. Open work spaces all around you buzz with researchers collaborating on high-definition displays, computer monitors, and laptops. It might sound like a high-tech incubator in Silicon Valley, but it’s Clemson University’s main library - which had more than 1.4 million visitors in 2016 - as it joins others across the country in adapting to the digital age

Librarians should lead the way in technology use among fellow residents and gain more time for the most important activity: helping patrons. Since the main mission of most libraries is to offer equality of access to information for every citizen, then why not be a trendsetter in digital use and implement innovative technologies?

This article presents a range of relevant and useful innovative technologies to implement at the library. We focus on the technology’s applicability for the library and not on the potential budgetary impacts of said technologies.

PHILADELPHIA, PA -- Libraries in Philadelphia along with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation have teamed up with Pokémon GO to encourage residents to explore their neighborhoods and their libraries this summer.

There are five participating libraries where users can find and catch Pokémon. The initiative lasts from July10th through August 11th.

Renovations and reorganization at Loussac Library include a new main entrance and atrium, a relocated cafe and the circulation desk moving to the ground level. (Young Kim / Alaska Dispatch News)

Seven years ago, we were wondering what libraries were for in the internet age. This week, the Z.J. Loussac Library reopened in Midtown Anchorage, answering that question.

The library remodel won't be finished until the fall, but even with some plywood barriers and unfinished walls remaining, the building responds to one of society's most serious problems. It adds community to our use of information.

Previously, the building seemed dark and clogged. The navigational labyrinth was a metaphor for research as we did it back in 1986, when the library was built, and we dug through physical materials for information.

Last year I read Kevin Kelly’s book The Inevitable and I was struck by the way he described the 12 technological forces that he thinks will shape our future. The forces are named in the image above, but they’re not all that easy to understand. I’ve thought more about them and believe that at UTS Library we are actually making progress in all these areas, not always exactly as he describes, so I’ll outline what some of our initiatives are in the following images and text. For the sake of brevity, the only force I won’t be illustrating is Tracking, but rest assured that we are already doing some of that too and in fact you can see it in some of the examples I am using.

I am concentrating on three major areas: discovery and search; open access; and cultural and artistic stimulation.

The take-a-book, leave-a-book movement has gone global. As of last year, Little Free Libraries—those birdhouse-looking book-stops that pop up in people’s front yards—were represented in every U.S. state. Little Free Library has now touched down in more than 70 other countries. These book exchanges are now 50,000 strong and growing.

And at least one person wants to put a stop to them.

“There was something that kind of irked me about the title,” says Jane Schmidt, librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto. “As a librarian, my gut reaction to that was, ‘You know what else is a free library? A regular library.’”

Where many people see a charming yard decoration or a heart-warming civic-minded gesture, Schmidt finds something more nefarious at work. In a recent article for the Journal of Radical Librarianship—this is a real publication, launched in 2014 by the Radical Librarians Collective, now three peer-reviewed volumes in—she and another Canadian library scholar outline the case against Little Free Libraries, diving deep into mapping data, network effects, and recent library history to make their stand.

Borrowing books from street-side libraries for free, listening to excerpts of books on a TV show, reading via social media apps, kindling -- the novelties keep popping up and the vast Chinese readership loves them.BOOK-SHARING SERVICESLiu Yaqian, 29, works for a multinational company and describes herself as a "bookworm." She has borrowed around a hundred books from libraries in Beijing since 2011.In March last year, she found a 24-hour automated library near her office that holds about 400 books. "It's as convenient as an ATM! I no longer have to make the trek to the traditional libraries that are often out of the way," she said. In the past year, Liu has borrowed more than a book per week from the 24-hour book dispenser.The 24-hour library program is an innovation by the Capital Library of China and district libraries under the guidance of Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture. They have been seen on the streets of Beijing since 2010. There are 174 street libraries, each about the size of a street-side food stand dotting both downtown Beijing and its outskirts.

San Jose Public Libraries received a great that let them receive the Oculus Rift headset and the necessary computers to open up virtual reality to patrons. The grant is a partnership between the California Library Association and Oculus VR.

It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google dreamed of doing when it embarked on its ambitious book-digitizing project in 2002. It got part of the way there, digitizing at least 25 million books from major university libraries.

But the promised library of everything hasn’t come into being. An epic legal battle between authors and publishers and the Internet giant over alleged copyright violations dragged on for years. A settlement that would have created a Book Rights Registry and made it possible to access the Google Books corpus through public-library terminals ultimately died, rejected by a federal judge in 2011. And though the same judge ultimately dismissed the case in 2013, handing Google a victory that allowed it to keep on scanning, the dream of easy and full access to all those works remains just that.

Earlier this year, an article in the Atlantic lamented the dismantling of what it called “the greatest humanistic project of our time.” The author, a programmer named James Somer, put it like this: “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

That assessment may be technically true, but many librarians and scholars see the legacy of the project differently. In fact, academics now regularly tap into the reservoir of digitized material that Google helped create, using it as a dataset they can query, even if they can’t consume full texts. It’s a pillar of the humanities’ growing engagement with Big Data.

It’s also a handy resource for other kinds of research. “It’s hard to imagine going through a day doing the work we academics do without touching something that wouldn’t be there without Google Book Search,” says Paul Courant, now interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan. Courant was also interim provost at Michigan when Google first approached the university about scanning the contents of its library—a proposal that left him both “ecstatic and skeptical,” he says.

In early June, I was walking a trail in Land’s End in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, when I came upon a children’s book called The Fox Wish, by Kimiko Aman. Each page was a mounted panel, installed just a few feet away from the next, like storytime breadcrumbs.

It was a delightful book about a fox who steals a little girl’s jump rope, but it got me wondering: What’s a children’s book doing in this National Park?

Well, did you ever hear that opposites attract?

To find out more, I talk to Michele Gee, Chief of Education and Interpretation at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a Bay Area National Park. She tells me that last year, when the National Parks Service celebrated it’s centennial, they decided to really focus on a problem they’d been working on for years.

The National Parks reach out

“We have a certain population that loves their National Parks, visits regularly, but that doesn't reflect the diversity of our nation or the diversity of the Bay Area,” says Gee. “Lower income or people of color aren’t being drawn to the National Parks and don't have the access. They both don’t know about it, don't know it exists, but also don't necessarily feel welcome to come.

Students returning to Pennsylvania State University (PSU) this fall will find four new short story dispensing kiosks installed at libraries across campus, along with a website for submitting their own original stories for distribution through the kiosks. Developed by Short Édition of Grenoble, France, the kiosks’ simple interface allows users to select a story that takes one, three, or five minutes to read. Their story is then printed out on a narrow piece of sustainably-sourced thermal paper the size of a large receipt.“Libraries are a pretty logical fit for this,” Joseph A. Salem, associate dean for learning, undergraduate services and Commonwealth Campus Libraries for Penn State, told LJ, noting that part of the goal is to foster creative expression on campus and in the broader community. In addition to units at Penn State’s Paterno, Pattee, Architecture, and Physical and Mathematical Sciences Libraries, a fifth kiosk is installed at the public Schlow Centre Region Library in downtown State College

The BPL Bibliocycle, a bike and book trailer partnership with Boston Bikes, returns to the streets of Boston in its second season, visiting street fairs, markets, and community events to meet people where they are and deliver library services on-the-go. The first stop for the Bibliocycle will be on Saturday, May 16, at the Kite and Bike Festival in Franklin Park. “This program provides an abundance of educational opportunities for community members at a variety of local cultural events. I encourage Bostonians to utilize this great resource and learn more about the free services our library system offers,” said Mayor Martin J. Walsh. (more…)

A sea of paper crowns covered in star stickers, a baby running around wearing a shirt with the word “feminist” on the front, and a drag queen in a sparkly dress set a vibrant scene for Kingsbridge Library’s first ever Drag Queen Story Hour.

The event took place July 13, beginning with an enthusiastic musical rendition of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” before Angel Elektra, a drag queen from Yonkers, sat children and parents down to read a series of books ranging from “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle to “It’s Okay To Be Different” by Todd Parr.

Drag Queen Story Hour took the country by storm in 2015 when writer Michelle Tea and literary nonprofit Radar Productions held events in San Francisco where drag queens — male performers acting and dressing as women — read to children in bookstores, libraries and schools. The aim of the event, according to organizers, is to promote children’s imaginations, celebrate diversity, and show them that gender identity is determined on a personal basis.

Spokane County Library District Executive Director Nancy Ledeboer will retire this September.

“It’s so refreshing to be in a community that supports libraries,” Ledeboer said, recalling her first impression of Spokane.

In 1992, she began working at the Spokane City Library as youth services coordinator and later as assistant director of the library system.

She moved to the King County Library System on the West Side in 1998 as an associate director. She then spent six years overseeing the 24 branches of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, first as the head of public services and eventually as the deputy director. She next moved to Tucson, Arizona, to be executive director of the Pima County Public Library.

“I became a librarian knowing that libraries can change a life by opening up doors and opening up minds,” she said. “But it was really working in Tucson that I came to see how libraries can actually transform communities.”

After an absence of roughly 13 years, she returned to Spokane in 2012 as the executive director of the Spokane County Library District.

When she asked her new library staff to tell her what they were proud of, she said, she received answers like “customer service” and “being good fiscal stewards.”

While she said these are important qualities, she found the library lacking an emphasis on “innovation” and “community.”

Throughout her time as director those two words became her top priorities.

In Tucson, she said, “The library became a transformational experience for the community.” She wanted the same for Spokane County.

Under Ledeboer’s leadership, the Spokane County Library District was chosen as one of 10 library systems in the U.S. to undergo an 18-month-long program called Libraries Transforming Communities, through which the district received a grant from the American Library Association to send five staff members to a series of workshops.

“We started to turn outward and say, ‘What can the library be in the community? What can we do to serve the community?’” she said.

Privacy is the Future The Library’s Role as Educator, Defender and Enforcer 24 June 2017 ALA Annual 2017Educate, protect and defend the patronLibraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to ideas. When users recognize or fear that their privacy or confidentiality is compromised, true freedom of inquiry no longer exists.

Once the initial dazzle of your new (or remade) library has worn off, just how do you keep up the pace and flavor of innovation? An expert from North Carolina State University offers her take.

By Dian Schaffhauser04/19/17

When the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University opened in 2013, it seemed nary an innovation was left out. The 225,000‐square‐foot building includes multiple display walls running at a resolution six times better than high-def; a whacked out game lab; a wide visualization space; creativity studios; nearly a hundred group study rooms and learning spaces; glass walls and writable surfaces anywhere you might lay an erasable marker; bookBot, a robotic book storage center with capacity for 2 million volumes; reconfigurable seating and tables everywhere (including a reported 60 different types of designer furniture); plus high-performance computing (HPC) and high-speed storage.

It took 98 pages for the university to describe the entirety of the wonders of the Hunt Library in its application for the 2014 Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries (which it handily won)

Collective Wisdom: An Exploration of Library, Archives and Museum Cultures was written by the participants in the Library, Archives and Museum Conference Exchange project, in which 18 librarians, archivists and museum professionals explored cross-sector practices and culture, and potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and continuing education.

This project was part of the grant-funded and OCLC-managed Coalition to Advance Learning.

The cohort was charged to 1) Build stronger cross-sector relationships; 2) Increase understanding of sector cultures; and 3) Identify opportunities for collaborative continuing education or professional development. The white paper summarizes their in-depth efforts in each of these three areas.

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